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Other Texts

This is a place for sharing texts that don’t directly pertain to the Grundrisse, but that can be useful for understanding Marx more broadly, for approaching him through different frameworks, or generally for theorizing communism.

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Foucault rarely talks about Marx or Marxism at length, but since this interview was conducted by a Communist journalist he was compelled to. From the preface to the Semiotext(e) edition: “Foucault’s antipathy toward Communist parties (especially the P.C.F.) is well known; it is extremely rare to find him engaged in serious discussion with a Communist intellectual. Despite the suspicions that occasionally surface on both sides in the discussion, the tone always remains one of mutual respect. Many writers have attempted to analyze Foucault’s relation to Marxism; these interviews shed additional light on that topic. Here we may recognize many of the strengths and weaknesses of two opposed positions: the desire to forge a revolutionary program by means of a mass political organization that provides global strategies as well as local tactics, on the one hand, is met by the desire to maintain a radical skepticism toward previous analyses of power relations and the strategies they entail, on the other.”

Alexandre Kojève’s introductory lectures on Hegel might be a good tool for tackling the most heavily Hegelian parts of the Grundrisse. These lectures at the École pratique des hautes études were attended by a gang of intellectual celebrities including Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lacan.

Hiroshi Uchida wrote A Study of Marx’s Grundrisse in 1982. This text doesn’t seem to have been translated yet, but marxists.org has excerpts from his other book, Marx’s Grundrisse and Hegel’s Logic. Here is also a recent collection of essays on Marx by Japanese academics that Uchida edited: